New Spore games target kids and Wii players

San Francisco: The long-awaited release of Will Wright's evolution game, Spore, wasn't the end of the journey. It was just the beginning.

At a chic San Francisco art gallery on Wednesday evening, Electronic Arts unveiled its plans to expand on the franchise in 2009. Wright and Co are looking to bring a wide variety of new players into the Spore universe. A new Creature Keeper game is aimed at young kids who want to play Tamagotchi with the monsters they create. Spore Hero is an action-adventure game for Wii. And a new expansion pack to the flagship PC game allows players to tweak the gameplay, creating their own adventures and challenging other players.

Spore, which was released last September, had years of hype behind it. The game promised to recreate the entire path of evolution, from cells swimming in the primordial ooze all the way to space travel. Critics were largely in agreement that while the game's creature-creation tools and procedurally-generated universes were stunning in their complexity, the gameplay laid on top of it was lacking.

Electronic Arts hopes it can evolve the series this year.

One of the most praised parts of Spore was the creature creator which allowed players to pull and prod body parts every which way to design amazing creatures, which they could then animate in a lifelike fashion. Spore Creature Keeper takes those monsters and dumps them into a virtual-pet game aimed at kids.

In addition to ensuring that their little creation gets its daily exercise, players will be able to decorate their critter's living space, and invite friends over for play dates. EA says it expects to release Creature Keeper in the summer.

Will Wright has said repeatedly that his company had planned to release a version of Spore for Nintendo's Wii console. EA finally made the official announcement last night: Spore Hero will be available this autumn.

The game will allow players to create and interact with a fully rendered creature, and then lead it on a casual adventure to become its galaxy's champion, with a number of challenges along the way. While EA held back on the details, it said that the game will maintain the franchise's focus on creating content and interacting with friends. But the Wii format will bring new challenges - it'll use the console's motion controls - and probably a whole new audience.

A Nintendo DS version of the game, Spore Hero Arena, is also scheduled for an autumn release.The highlight of the event was Spore Galactic Adventures, the game's first expansion pack for PC and Mac. It expands the creative pathways open to players by allowing them to create their own gameplay.

The core game allows you to play God: prodding a single-celled organism along the evolutionary road, you design entire civilisations to explore vast tracts of space, befriending (or conquering) neighbours. And with the social networking trappings of "Sporepedia," a compendium of user-created content, your universe is automatically populated by the creations of other players hooked in to the network. (EA said that more than 65 million creations are currently on the servers.)

But once you reach the final space stage of Spore, the gameplay becomes a bit underwhelming - once countless solar systems are at your fingertips, you'll quickly realise that there isn't very much to do. Galactic Adventures seeks to flesh out the final bits of Spore by adding a potent new tool set dubbed the "adventure creator," which allows you to create your own challenging levels and play others.

While we weren't allowed to get hands-on with the world-shaping, the demo that EA showed us demonstrated that the adventure creator should be just as intuitive a tool as all of Spore's others. You won't be able to alter the size or shape of a planet, but geological features like lofty volcanoes or winding lakes can be planted with a click of your mouse. You can change the temperature from a ball of magma to a frigid wasteland or anything in between.

Once you've crafted the ideal layout, the full bulk of the Sporepedia will be available, allowing you to populate your world with any number of creatures, buildings, vehicles and objects that other users have created. Then it's time to start crafting an adventure. Much like Sony's creative PlayStation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, the definition of an adventure will largely be up to the individual designer. One quest I saw involved rescuing a princess from the clutches of a massive predator, while another challenged players to defend creatures from their hostile neighbours, as they migrated from one end of a planet to another.

Players will be able to create vehicle races, hedge mazes, and even platforming puzzles based on navigating a hazardous environment. The tools are fairly open-ended, and adventure-designers will have a great deal of control over how characters and objects interact with one another, including adding dialogue or controlling the feelings and reactions that a particular quest's actor has towards a player's character.

Every adventure is tied to the planet that you create. Once you've completed your opus and uploaded it to the Sporepedia, it functions much like any other user-created object - you can search the web page for new content, or simply play the game as you normally would, and wait for the adventures to come to you. As you travel around the Spore universe, you'll occasionally encounter a player-created quest, and Galactic Adventures will allow your creature to beam down onto the surface of a planet to explore.

New equipment and abilities will be added with this expansion pack, tools of the trade that no self-respecting spacefarer should be without. These include all sorts of rocket launchers and laser blasters to ward off hostiles, in addition to jet packs and hover boots, to help space explorers navigate treacherous terrain.

Players will be able to rate the adventures they encounter, and popular levels with higher ratings will spread about the Spore-universe, while the drivel will fade into obscurity. Adventures will also have leaderboards, so that players who complete a level will be able to see how well they performed, when compared to players around the world.

When Galactic Adventures debuts later this spring, it will ship with a few dozen adventures crafted by the game's designers, but it will largely be up to players to create the universe as they see fit. If the success of the current content creators are any indication - more than 200,000 new items are being uploaded every day - it's going to be an exciting time to be a Spore fan.